“Oh, well,” the real John Millyard reflected years later, “journalists are all — and I include myself — grave robbers and vultures who swallow experiences and regurgitate them in another form for fun and profit.”36
Ironically, a few years later, Peter included “Ten Rules for Playing Golf” in Peter Gzowski’s Book About This Country in the Morning. A good player never talks when others are hitting; nor does he cheat, for “golf is a game of honour.” And by the way, Peter advised, a golfer should always enjoy himself.
On July 8, 1964, Harry Bruce turned thirty, and five days later, so did Peter. To celebrate what they called FOTT, the Festival of Turning Thirty, they began their toasts on the eighth and drank booze “harder than ever for five days in a row.”37 Also in 1964, the brilliant photographer Lutz Dille captured a more sober Peter in an intimate moment with his daughter, Alison, who peers over a banister at her father as he reaches up to touch her (see page 106). Peter’s affection is palpable. It was a tenderness that he rarely, if ever, revealed in the corridors and offices of that impregnable concrete building at 481 University Avenue, the headquarters of the Maclean-Hunter empire.
— 6 — A Sharp Eye on the World of Entertainment, 1964–1967
Canadians think like people who want, usually in vain, all international sayings to end with a point about Canadians.
— Peter Gzowski, “The Global Village Has Everything but Surprises,” Saturday Night, December 1968
Ron McEachern, a man of few compliments, got it right when he called Borden Spears distinguished, professional, and intelligent.1 Soon after taking command of Maclean’s, Spears hired Peter as his television reviewer. No doubt Spears had noted Peter’s interest in television, beginning when he was the Quebec editor for Maclean’s. On January 27, 1962, Peter had examined a new technique that allowed Hungarian-born cartoonist George Feyer to draw cartoons from behind a screen, which allowed him to be invisible. His cartoons appeared to create themselves. In the entertainment section of Maclean’s on March 10, 1962, Peter was vexed at the Canadian-content regulations imposed by the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG). Because Canadian television was forced to show a certain number of hours of Canadian content, networks simply created mind-numbing quiz shows. Again, in the February 23, 1963, issue of Maclean’s, in a review called “The Carnies on the Picture Tube,”2 Peter blamed the BBG for the fact that much of the Canadian content on television was junk. In 1962, even Radio-Canada, Peter pointed out, was following BBG regulations with silly game shows such as La Poule aux oeufs d’or.
In the television section of “Maclean’s Reviews” of March 9, 1963, Spears would also have seen Peter’s review of the CBC Television show Inquiry, which he deemed the network’s best public affairs show. Even after Peter resigned from the magazine, Maclean’s published one of his television reviews, no doubt written before the mass resignation. Spears may have been scrambling to assemble his first issue, and, of course, he knew that Peter wrote astute reviews. In the September 1964 issue, Peter expressed surprise and disappointment that television had turned the Canadian Open into a dull experience. During the first part of the golf tournament, Peter had followed the players along the fairways of the Pinegrove Country Club near Montreal. To watch the final rounds, he located a television set. He was greatly disappointed. “One of my favorite sequences,” Peter wrote sarcastically, “has the camera following a ball after it has been driven — up, up into the air and then bouncie, bouncie, as it rolls along the grass. What this is supposed to illustrate, I can’t imagine.” You would think, he wrote, that after so many years of broadcasting the game on television, “the networks would have learned a little about how to make golf interesting.”3
Although Spears didn’t hesitate to hire Peter,4 he thought it best that his reviewer remain anonymous. Henceforth he was known as “Strabo,” the Greek geographer who lived at the time of Christ. Peter claimed, perhaps incorrectly, that the name meant “squinter.”5 In any case, “Strabo” suited Peter’s role as someone who squinted at a television screen in order to see around and behind the images presented on that screen.
Strabo’s first television review appeared on February 6, 1965. In “TV’s ‘7 Days’ — Not a Gem in All That Muck,” Strabo came down hard on the CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days, a current affairs show broadcast live each Sunday evening during the mid-1960s. This Hour, deemed Strabo, was raking muck for the sake of raking muck. And it failed “to raise or clarify a single legitimate national issue — unless one considers its bold stand against the corrosion of cars by salt.” When Peter wrote that damning review, the two hosts were John Drainie and Laurier LaPierre, who had been chosen from a list of candidates that included Peter Jennings; Pierre Trudeau; Trudeau’s future father-in-law, James Sinclair; and someone called Peter Gzowski.6
On March 6, 1965, in an article called “Why the Real Sports Fans Stay Home,” Strabo discussed how television was changing the way fans viewed sports events. With the new tools of television such as instant replays, “stop-action,” and the “isolated” camera, which could focus on an individual athlete, television viewers in the mid-1960s were beginning to enjoy not only immediacy but omniscience. Strabo argued that all this technology helped to make Hockey Night in Canada the most popular show on Canadian television.7 Two weeks later Strabo wrote about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Danger Man, which used nonsensical dialogue and a plethora of James Bond–type gadgets to satirize the spy thriller genre. When Jonathan Miller, Johnny Wayne, and Frank Shuster, whom Strabo called “the three most accomplished satirists on TV,” tried to satirize The Man from U.N.C.L.E., they failed. “You can’t spoof a program that won’t take itself seriously,” concluded Strabo.8 On April 3, 1965, Strabo complained about commercial breaks. He chastised Bell Telephone for interrupting the mood of a show about Duke Ellington with silly commercials. Instead, he urged Bell to announce its sponsorship at the beginning and end of the program.9 On April 17, 1965, Strabo again complained about the fact that television was trivializing the good, old parlour game called “Charades.”10 On May 1 he denounced stereotypes on television, specifically the nice “Negro.”11
On June 19, 1965, Maclean’s published an article called “How the ‘Flush Test’ Rates Your TV Habits.” Although it bore no byline, the mischievous style seems like Peter’s. In order to gauge viewer interest in Sunday evening shows, the magazine asked the Public Utilities Commission of Barrie, Ontario, to gauge the volume of water used during Bonanza and This Hour Has Seven Days on Sunday evening, April 2. This Hour came out the winner. In other words, fewer viewers of that show had wandered off to relieve themselves and flush their toilets. Similar surveys in Saskatoon and Peterborough yielded the same results, the anonymous writer noted.12
In one column, Strabo admitted that he enjoyed American quiz shows such as Call My Bluff and Jeopardy, first broadcast in March 1964. Both were much better than what he called the “kindergarten pap” of Canadian quiz shows.13 In another column, written after spending a sunny May afternoon watching ninety consecutive television commercials during the third annual Canadian Television Commercials Festival in Toronto, a grumpy Strabo complained that, no matter what the quality of the commercials was, the admen in the audience applauded.14 In July, Strabo wondered, as he sipped gin and tonic on a summer evening, why he was presented with so many reruns of mundane TV programs. Why, for instance, did the CBC not replay its best shows from the 1950s, or even American dramas like Marty or the comedy shows of Sid Caesar?15 In his last column as Strabo, Peter wrote about one of his great concerns: that television might be robbing his children of the sense of wonder that he, as a boy, experienced whenever he met a “star” like Foster Hewitt or a hockey player like Max Bentley. Strabo informed his readers that he had never lost his childhood sense of wonder whenever a star hockey player (Eric Nesterenko?) or a well-known singing couple (Ian and Sylvia?) came to dinner. His children,